Interplay management involves deliberate efforts by one or more actors to improve the interplay of institutions set up for earth system governance. This chapter synthesizes two decades of conceptual and empirical research on the conditions that influence the conduciveness of interplay management to earth system governance. Those conditions concern the agency and the means of management, notably whether interplay management proceeds by means of coordination or adaptation, as well as the compatibility of the policy objectives pursued. Agents of interplay management are states, intergovernmental organizations and industry- or civil-society groups, seeking to mobilize assets such as material resources, expertise or legitimacy held by one institution to promote objectives pursued under another. Means employed are frequently variants of unilateral adaptation to norms and programmes undertaken in other institutions, rather than explicit coordination involving joint decision-making. Cross-institutional coordination has obvious advantages and is particularly valuable when the institutions govern highly interdependent activities or can bring to bear complementary capacities. With clearly competitive elements present, adaptation has the advantage of triggering less turf-sensitive resistance.

During the 1990s, protection of the Arctic marine environment has attracted intense political attention, engaging diplomats, parliamentarians, researchers and non-governmental organisations across the Arctic rim – and well beyond. The disclosure of Soviet dumping of radioactive waste in the Barents and Kara Seas is among the main reasons for this. It is now clear that such dumping has been conducted for decades – by the Northern Fleet as well as by the civilian Murmansk Shipping Company, the operator of nuclear-run icebreakers in the Northern Sea Route. Measured at the time of disposal, the total radioactivity dumped into Arctic seas by the Soviet Union is twice as high as that of all previously known dumping worldwide. The most intensely radioactive type of waste stems from nuclear vessel reactors which still contain high-level spent fuel.

Parts of this dumping occurred in violation of Soviet commitments to the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (London Convention); this forms the point of departure for this chapter. In particular, we will focus on how international regimes may affect domestic implementation in member states. The core of the argument is that Soviet and later Russian management of nuclear waste in the north has been significantly influenced by regulations and programmes generated under international dumping instruments.

Over the past decade the states governing the Arctic territories have taken on a variety of commitments regarding marine environmental management. As the first three chapters of this book have shown, several global regimes have emerged thus far. At the regional level, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) has generated a range of programmatic activities, vastly improving the level of knowledge about the nature and gravity of environmental hazards in the high North. The focus of this chapter is on sub-regional marine environmental protection, more specifically the bilateral Russian–Norwegian Environmental Commission and the multilateral Barents Euro–Arctic Region. The aim is to bring out whether and how these sub-regional cooperative processes can complement efforts at the regional and global levels.

There are several reasons for including the Barents Euro–Arctic Region in a study of protection of the marine environment, although the 1993 Kirkenes Declaration, on which the latter structure is based, made no mention of marine areas when delineating the spatial scope of the cooperation. The unsettled maritime delimitation of the Barents Sea between Russia and Norway is the main reason for not mentioning marine cooperation.

For one thing, much of the marine pollution in the Barents Sea area originates from land-based activities which fall clearly within the cooperative domain of the Declaration. This goes for matters such as leakages from land-based storages of radioactive waste and riverborne or atmospheric pollution from, e.g., the metallurgical industry on the Kola Peninsula and elsewhere.